Uncovering the Cover Ups: Death Camp in Delta [View all]

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Mark Denbeaux on the NCIS cover-up of three “suicides” at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp

By Scott Horton

In the June issue, Harper’s Magazine has published the eyewitness account of a military policeman describing the events of the night of June 9, 2006, at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, when three prisoners died under mysterious circumstances that the U.S. government has sought to pass off as a series of synchronized suicides. The account is one of a group of previously unnoted documents, uncovered by researchers at Seton Hall Law School, that collectively demonstrate that the government’s own investigation did not support its claims about the deaths. They are the subject of a new report, Uncovering the Cover Ups: Death Camp in Delta. I put six questions to Professor Mark Denbeaux about the report:

1. Among other things, Seton Hall’s new report focuses on a bombshell document that Harper’s has reproduced in the current issue. How was this document discovered?

Finding needles in haystacks is what my Seton Hall students do best. Working with senior fellows at the Center for Policy and Research, they discovered this document in the summer of 2010. In a sense, it is not “new,” because it has been lying in a mountain of documents released by FOIA. But there are many more documents released through FOIA than anyone can review. Except for us. We read them.

Our 2009 report, Death in Camp Delta, proved that the conclusions of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service were wrong. We knew the claim that the men were found dead hanging in their cells was untrue. The question was whether the NCIS had been incompetent or had covered up the cause and manner of the deaths. We began to investigate how it could have been so wrong, while giving the government the benefit of all doubt.

http://harpers.org/blog/2014/06/uncovering-the-cover-ups-death-camp-in-delta/